Gingerbread House

I could probably find a recipe for gingerbread cookies and make a house and all that, but I didn’t. Realistically, the house rarely gets eaten and the fun is in the decoration.

Food media

I was listening to the Milk Street Radio Podcast about Thanksgiving where Christopher Kimball was discussing Food media with Dan Pashman of The Sporkful. Dan says as a member of the food media he feels pressured to constantly come up with new and innovative ideas in food. I had a couple of revelations:

• If I felt like being pretentious, I could claim that I am now a member of the food media (a very insignificant member of the global scale of food media, but…)
• I currently have no pressure to do anything new, except in the case of everything old is new again.
• Sheryl of A Hundred Years Ago is on my wavelength as far as this goes.

So what’s my point? Eat what you want. Try new things. Just be you and don’t worry about it.

Found on the Back: Mini Pages

There were so many great things about going to Grandma and Grandpa’s when I was a child.  I would sit at the table in their eat-in kitchen while grandma was cooking something.  The rainbows from the prisms she had in her window would dance across the walls.  I could look out the window and see the tree that I loved to climb.  Grandma would keep a stack of Mini Pages there for us to do.  When we moved Grandma and Grandpa into assisted living last fall, I found the crayon box with my name on it from when I was a child.  There were fewer colors then.  But regardless of what my kids think, the world was not black and white.

The Mini Pages were, though. I found some things from the Mini Pages on the back of some of the recipes.  Because I am unsure about copyright laws and all the stuff that goes along with it, I am providing a link to the the archived Mini Pages from 1981 about Thanksgiving.  The Mini Pages were this amazing educational tool.  There was information, puzzles, and recipes.  (I’ve made some of those recipes, the feature hot dogs pretty heavily).

This is my quick version of the sketches:

Found on the Back: Grocery List

It’s Sunday.  I didn’t menu plan or grocery shop yesterday.  If I don’t do it today, I’m going to be behind all week.  Although it looks like this list may be for some sort of party (or maybe to make frozen fruit salad) I just need basics.

I thought I had posted the recipe for frozen fruit salad, but I guess I didn’t.  Guess that’ll be Tuesday’s post. If you are headed out to the store and want to do a cook along with me on Tuesday get the whipping cream, butter mints, and some nuts.  If your pantry is stocked like a grandma’s, you should have everything else you need already.

 

Found on the Back: Elizabeth “Ma” Duncan

While searching through recipes and content to find perfect Halloween fodder for the blog, I remembered that when I wrote about Edna Ruth Bullock, I had mentioned that I had another “killer” story to share.  (Kind of punny).  So in honor of Halloween and all things horror, let me introduce you to Ma Duncan.  A plain, simple woman that was guilty of maybe loving her son too much.  While women frequently have tenuous relationships with their mothers-in-law, I don’t know of anyone whose mother-in-law has tried to kill them.

 

Read more about Elizabeth Duncan on Wikipedia and in the LA Times.